The Judge of Ages

The girl with glowing hair rushed forward, and but then stopped on the first stair of the dais, hands on hips. She tossed back her head and pouted. “You don’t remember! How rude! And I thought you had a perfect, posthuman memory! It’s me, Trey!”

She made a noise of exasperation and stamped her foot. “Trey Soaring Azurine! I was aboard when our chaplain, Brother Roger, showed you that your wife had stolen a star out of heaven, which I think was very romantic. Aboard the aeroscaphe!”

“Roger also told me I could not stay sexfriends with Tessa and Woggy, and so what else did I have to live for? You are the only man I know who lives up to Brother Roger’s ridiculous rules, being in love with only one woman forever, and so I wanted to see if you could live long enough to meet your wife.”

“Who are all those dogs with guns? They’re cute! Do they work for you?” One squad of dog things, twenty-four of them, reacting to a gesture from Ull, were no longer aiming at the Witches, but had made an about-face, and had their weapons trained on Trey.

Yuen scowled, and whirled his named weapon in an elaborate flourish, cracking the whip with a loud snap, and gazed with ferocious hatred toward Montrose. “Here is the Judge of Ages, at last! No Beta, but a race-impostor!”

But Daae curtly but softly said, “Yuen! At ease. The Judge is our savior and ally. No other race was he worthy to hide among. Women! Aim at Ull. He is the enemy.” The two Beta maidens drew their bowstrings back to their ears with an ominous creak of bowshafts, and Lady Ivinia, as graceful as an Olympian statue, drew back her javelin, preparing to cast.

2. Bashan

With a motion impossibly swift for one his great size, the Giant turned toward and swept a dozen dog things up in his arm and threw them onto their fellows. With his other hand, he caught up Menelaus Montrose from next to a bewildered and giggling Trey Azurine, and, cradling Menelaus in one arm, the Giant plunged across the chamber, overleaped the fountain, and ran toward the statue of the Grim Reaper like an elephant charging.

As Bashan passed the alcove with the atomic pile, he reached with his hand, wrenching his long wand free, opening wider the deadly rent; and now he used that length, tall as the mast of a ship, to swat aside any dogs or automata who dared to step in his way to hinder him, or else, in one stroke, to crush them.

All in the chamber were as astonished as if they had seen a creeping glacier rear up and sprint. The Giant had moved so very slowly before, leaning carefully on the wand; and Menelaus knew the risk the Giant took, for the bones and joints even of its huge, toeless, cylindrical legs had not been designed with such fast and jarring motions in mind. Even a simple fall, for Bashan, would be as a fall from a roof.

Of the forty or so dog things between him and his goal, not one withstood his coming, but they panicked and broke, fleeing left and right as the monstrous man plunged past, his footfalls an earthquake.

Laughing madly, Trey Azurine dashed after the retreating Giant, two long streamers of fabric sparking and floating behind her, lighter than silk; nor did any close with her to stop her. Scipio, who was the only one there who had no idea how dangerous was her hunger silk that flapped and snapped so close to his face, ran along behind her, his red robes hiked up about his knees, but no one’s eyes were on him.

As Menelaus flew, tucked in the Giant’s arm neatly as a nursing baby, with the floor a dizzying distance below a blur and his bones jarred at every cyclopean footfall, Menelaus picked up a message in his implants, compressed into the Savant high-speed language.

“Answer this, Dr. Montrose. Why was my race taught the Cliometry from your enemies, rather than from you? Why, if we were doomed either to over-expand and fragment, or dwindle and pass away, were we ever brought into being?”

Because he was within touch-range, Montrose could answer faster than speech in the same language over his implants, making the Savant modulations he could not make with his mouth and throat. “Dr. Hugh-Jones, in war, a captain leads men into valleys from which they will not come back. So it is in this great war against the Hermetic view of the universe, but it is races, not men, who fall. The Giants were needed at their time and place precisely to prevent the takeover of the whole world by the Ghosts, and to work the salvation of man.”

Bashan hid the look of agony on his ugly face, but his golden eyes were haunted. “Dr. Montrose, do you not know what kind of civilization and society we could have built, the unimaginable beauty of it? If so, why were the greater, the Giants, sacrificed to save the weaker, the men?”

Montrose sent, “It was not by my design, but their own.”

Bashan sent, “Yet you designed their designs, you and Thucydides Montrose. We are posthumans, Dr. Montrose! Why should such as we sacrifice ourselves for humans?”

Montrose sent, “Because we are not Hermeticists, Dr. Hugh-Jones. Except among savages, the great die to save the meek, and the strong for the sake of the weak. It has always been so.”

Bashan nodded his great head. “So it shall be again, Dr. Montrose.”

Reaching the far end unhindered, Bashan reached up, and as if he were placing a jar on a high shelf, he tucked Menelaus onto the upper balcony.

Menelaus found his feet, stiffened a cloak-hem to axlike sharpness, and chopped open a wooden panel, which fell in two huge triangular sections to reveal a steel vault door nine feet high and six wide. This vault door was locked, absurdly enough, with a chain and padlock like something from before the First Space Age.

“I don’t have the key!” shouted Menelaus. “Can you break the chain?”

“Oh? Break the chain…?” Bashan, grinning a grisly grin with his weird little baby-mouth, reached up with both hands, strained casually, and yanked the whole huge steel vault door out of its hinges in a spray of rock dust and snapping metal bars. Beyond was a standard old-fashioned firing station, with scopes and triggers, already lit and waiting. Menelaus jumped toward it.

Ull, seeing the firing station, cried out, “Fire, my Followers, fire!”

Immediately the squad of dog things that had scattered at the charge of the Giant ran, two dozen of them, formed their double ranks, and raised their weapons. They fired. Six of the dog things lined against the Witches executed a neat half turn and also fired at Bashan. A cloud of white smoke rose, smelling of gunpowder.

At the same moment, the guns in the chandeliers swiveled, and with a sound like continuous thunder, those thirty dog things were blown into bloody rags, heads exploding under the impact of bullets from above. Four other dog things near the Witches who had not fired, but who were standing near, also fell, as did two of the Witch-men of the Demonstrator caste, hit by shrapnel or stray fire.

Swift as this was, it was too late to save Bashan. The musketballs were explosive, emitting various forms of radiation, and so the broad back of the Giant erupted with eerie flames. He did not cry out, but turned, holding the broken slab of cabinet door across his body like a shield, staggering one step and then another, and then he toppled hugely onto the line of dogs guarding the Chimerae. Eight jumped clear; the others stared upward in shock, ears and tails drooping, or fired vainly into the vast slab of metal descending on them, before it, and the weight of the dead Giant, flattened the dog things in a grisly crescendo of snapping bones and popping skulls into a spreading lake of blood, fur, crushed metal, and tangled meat.

Ull called out, “Destroy the fire control!”

Despite his recent demotion, all the Blue Men saw the sense of the command, and obeyed him.

Even those directly beneath the balcony fired, drilling holes through the marble flooring with the white-hot needles of their energy weapons. Thirty-four lines of energy, bright as lightning, converged on the panel where Menelaus stood. The material of his cloak hindered the beams long enough for him to fling himself aside, with only a few second-degree burns scraped in parallel lines along his back, as if a giant cat made out of lightning had clawed him. Not a single handweapon of the Blue Men missed: Menelaus knew they were computer-aimed by their inbuilt serpentine segments.

The guns in the chandeliers opened fire on the Blue Men, but their gems glittered like flame, and the bullets fell to their left and right, missing their targets; the chandelier guns recognized the futility of it, and fell silent.

“Trey!” Menelaus shouted in Merikan over the thunder-snap of the laser-guided electrical charges. “Order Azurine to stop firing!”

3. Hormagaunts

The Hormagaunts, not needing any additional prompting or excuse, emitted clouds of acrid spores, and began killing any dog things or Blue Men who came within range of their claws, spines, poisoned fangs, poisoned stinger tails.

A trio of dogs rushed at Gload, but their bayonets and sabers scraped along his tortoise shell integument without penetrating; he stumped forward as slowly as an armored car, grabbing two of them and stuffing them headfirst into the vast toothy maw of his stomach. Then, disdaining opponents of mere flesh and blood, he lumbered over to the nearest digging automaton, and wrestled with the blades that clashed off his armor, set his thick legs, and toppled the automaton to the floor, metal bars bending under his monstrous fingers.

Crile was agile as a lizard, twisting and dodging in an eye-defeating blur of speed, his tail like a whip, and the dog things behind him staggered like drunks, sagging and fainting, succumbing to almost invisible punctures and scratches of deadliest poison. Lightning-swift, Crile leaped on the head of one, and then to the head of another, before the dog things could raise a paw to protect themselves, and when he leaped to the next, their eye sockets were empty of all save streams of blood and vitreous humor.

Wild musket fire shot upward and every which way, missing the too-swift Hormagaunt, but drawing down retaliation from overhead fire. One musket fusillade, striking the ceiling, ignited and severed the supports, bringing one of the stalactite-shaped chandeliers crashing to the floor, where its arsenal and powder magazine exploded, killing ten dogs. Preceptor Naar, glancing over his shoulder at the distraction with a bored sneer, pointed his pistol and electrocuted Crile in midleap.

A Mastiff charged Gload with a bayonet; Gload opened wide his monstrous belly-mouth and caught the musket between his teeth and bit it in twain. Plucking up the poor Mastiff by the leg, Gload began striking left and right, using the screaming dog thing as a living bludgeon to batter down its squad mates. Preceptor Orovoy, with a pistol in either hand, shot Gload, who merely laughed, for his shell turned mirror-bright and deflected the laserlight; Orovoy adjusted his pistols for other outputs, only to discover that Gload was grounded against electric shock, proof against microwave burns, and resistant to gamma radiation; whereupon Gload picked up a nearby automaton hugely in both hands, and tossed it onto the wizened old dwarf.

The gems on his coat lit up heroically, applying a magnetic force against the huge mass. It slowed slightly, or almost did, but the overloaded gems flared and went dark, and Preceptor Orovoy was flattened, and burst in every direction like a wine grape beneath a shoe.

Soorm pulled a dog thing, one in each claw, into the fountain with him, making them jump and yowl with staggers of electricity, and impaled the bodies on the central water jet in the middle. In a moment the whole pool was red and opaque. It must have been much deeper than it seemed, like a cistern, for Soorm sank into it and vanished from sight. When a trio of unwary dog things leaned over, bayonets ready, a scorpion tail impaled the first through the ribs before it could scream, and webbed claws grabbed the others to the right and left, and yanked all three down into the water with remarkable swiftness. There was some splashing and agitation in the pool, and then the waters turned redder.

4. Clades

One of the older Blue Men, Invigilator Saaev, left off firing his pistols, and had one of the automata nearby hoist him up to its operator cage (which looked to Menelaus remarkably like haversack a squaw might use for carrying a papoose: an ugly metal squaw shaped like a praying mantis, with a very ugly blue-skinned, prune-wrinkled papoose with wizened eyes). Saaev shouted verbal orders to nearby automata: “Employ the Gas of Peace!”

And the insect-shaped mechanism drew out canisters and threw them left, right, and within the central fountain, where they hissed and emitted growing clouds of filmy gray gas that darkened to an inky black as it thickened.

Zouave Zhigansk was near the statue of Michael the Archangel. He was not as heavily modified as a true Hormagaunt, but his nostrils could pinch shut like those of a sea lion, and he had some immunity to the soporific. He stayed within the gas cloud, daring the dog things to shoot at him, and whenever a bold bulldog or thin-faced whippet ventured too close, Zouave either sprayed something from hidden scent glands that made the dog recoil, yowling, or Zouave flung a porcupine quill into a muzzle with surprising accuracy.

Zouave had, one in either hand, antiques recovered from the broken weapon cases. The first one he now fired, but the shot went high, and the payload exploded into lesser payloads in midair, riddling the stalactite-shaped chandeliers without effect.

The second weapon was a silver club that shot a hypodermic needle, which failed to affect the dog thing physiology. The dog, a Saint Bernard badly in need of a trim, merely yowled at the sting. In frustration Zouave threw the silver club with great force toward the Saint Bernard, who was struck in the nose and was blinded when the propellant liquid chamber broke and splashed chemical in its eyes.

The blinded beast dropped its musket. Growing bolder, as well as growing low on breath, Zouave emerged from the black cloud, and snatched up that musket. Finding it empty, he ran at the nearest Blue Man, the handyman named Unwing.

Bedel Unwing, unfortunately, was paying no attention. He was carefully directing pistol-fire at the balcony at the far side of the great chamber, the tip of his tongue sticking from the corner of his mouth in concentration. This was the first opportunity Unwing had been given to join the higher-status members of his order in a significant venture, and his hope had been to better himself in their eyes, so he was obeying all instructions carefully. No one had instructed him to watch his back.

Zouave ran him through, and the little man screamed in shock, outrage, and surprise; his scream became a gargle of blood, and then a death rattle.

Even as he did the deed, Zouave was struck from behind by the blind and maddened Saint Bernard, who did not need eyes to find and tear out Zouave’s throat. The dog died at that same time, overcome by the number and toxicity of the spines Zouave left in its muzzle, skull, paws, and neck. The three corpses lay piled atop each other.

The three Donors, Toil, Drudge, and Drench, succumbed to the vapor, and lay in a heap near him, trembling and holding their heads.

Prissy Pskov was on the other side of the chamber near the stand of powered armor, beneath the statue of Hades. Her weapon was a handheld flamer, and she sprayed fire right and left, while dog things screamed and fled out of range, perhaps due to their instinctive fear of fire, perhaps due to the smoke and the overpowering odor of petrol and magnesium. She did not really want to hurt the dogs, recognizing the craftsmanship which had gone into creating them, so she tended to aim too low, striking the golden floor before her feet, and driving the dogs back rather than lighting them afire.

Prissy was astonished at her easy victory up until the moment when a gas canister landed at her feet. Not a thing from her era, she did not recognize it, and did not realize it was a threat, until she leaned over it, and was overcome by the first gush as it erupted. She sniffed curiously at the odd scent. Down she fell, but the barbs in her hair continued to move and sway, and puddles of fire burned to her left and right, and no one approached her.

Even though the dog things stayed well away from the black cloud, which was visible, an influence continued to spread from the fallen Prissy Pskov, which was not visible. The dogs in a moment had broken out in rashes and scabs, had fur falling in patches, and soon were running in circles, biting themselves and each other, howling madly. More than a score of dogs were affected by this in under a minute, and all fled away from that quarter of the chamber.

5. Warlock

At about this time, one of the dog things with a sharp nose, scenting something, poked with a pike between the wheels of the smaller sky-blue coffin, probing the undercarriage, and was rewarded with an exclamation of rage. Out from beneath the blue coffin came Mickey of Williamsburg, hands held high.

The triplets, Preceptors Ydmoy, Yndelf, and Yndech, left off firing their pistols at the balcony, and overcome with curiosity, turned to examine the rotund Witch-man. Their coat gems flickered briefly as they probed and communed.

Yndelf said, “Tune your pistols to the radio frequency of our mites; despite the radioactivity, we shall drive the signal through the interference and activate the paralytic mites in his nervous system.”

Three thin rays of laser energy, blindingly white, with invisible beams of radio frequencies heterodyned on them, flickered across the imposing form of the rotund Witch. He laughed, kicking his knees high in a jig, thumbs in the earpieces of his hat, then turned his back toward the Blue Men, bowing and slapping his wobbling buttocks cheeks with either palm.

Yndech said, “I think I have deduced the rudiments of the expressive and posture-related nonverbal cues of these antique pre-Locust creatures. I interpret this to be a gesture of disrespect.”

“The relict seems to be of normal human biology and neural pattern,” said Ydmoy in a contemplative tone. “How was he not affected by the paralytic mites?”

Mickey could not understand the language, but he laughed nonetheless, and said something in Virginian. “Do you think I am fool enough to eat fairy food? Mortals never return from the Land Beyond once they taste of those unearthly viands! No, I merely rubbed the beans and rice you offered on my teeth, and spit all out after. You think I cannot fast for a week with all this stored blubber? Ah! But watch this trick I learned from Brother Hare!”

And he flinched in terror at the sight of the Clade-dwellers at two opposite sides of the chamber succumbing to black gas, and he began backing away.

Ydmoy said to Yndech, “It would be enlightening if you would again share your knowledge of the gesture significations of the pre-Locust relict.”

Yndech exclaimed, “Aha! Again I can interpret the nonverbal signs! The Relict Melechemoshemyazanagual Onmyoji de Concepcion is frightened of the pacification gas! Notice how he moves away from it, and at the same time opens wide his mouth and both eyes, crossing his forearms before his face. He bangs his knees together. The gesture is unambiguous!”

Ydmoy nodded gravely. “Impressive! You command an adroit body of learning.”

But Yndelf said, “Inconclusive. Possibility exists that he gesticulates in such a fashion for some other purpose.”

Ydmoy said, “Small possibility! Let us test!” and he signaled for the nearest automaton to throw a canister at Mickey. The nearest dog thing, seeing the automaton throw, dropped its musket, went to all fours, and sprinted away.

The canister landed and the cloud spread, and now Mickey merely laughed, shouting in his own language, “I ingest larger doses of the holy drug than this for recreation, or to clear my sinuses! Your magic is weaker than mine, Blue Men!”

“The Followers cannot enter the gas cloud,” said Yndelf thoughtfully. “And the cloud interferes with the penetration power of our laser-based handweapons.”

Ydmoy, nodding, commanded two of the automata forth. The metal figures, in perfect lockstep, clanked into the cloud, striding with menacing purpose.

All three Blue Men flinched at the deafening noise of metal breaking, and stared when one of the automata came hopping backward on one leg, its hip motors whirling the shattered struts of its other leg. In the same moment, the sky-blue coffin came roaring out of the cloud, machine guns blazing, and ran over the wounded automaton. Such was the speed and the forward momentum of the coffin that it struck the falling automaton as if striking a ramp, and sailed wildly into the air, shooting vents of jellied gasoline left and right, while the loudspeakers amplified the yodels and whoops of Mickey the Witch.

The three Blue Men commanded dogs and automata against the raging coffin, and retreated across the chamber toward the statue of Father Time, at whose feet the deadliest fight in the chamber was even then waxing hot.

The ceiling guns and wall cannons twitched, but did not open fire on a coffin their records showed was rightfully stored in the chamber, and authorized to use deadly force against intruders. Unimpeded, chanting his battle-spells through the coffin loudspeakers, the Warlock of Williamsburg drove his enemies before him, moving toward the central fountain.

Mickey was certain the magic was strong within him that hour.

6. Nymphs

When the Nymphs were first overcome by the cloud, Oenoe, and Aea and Thysa, seeing that it was a suppressant of the higher brain functions only, put themselves into a hypnogogic state, akin to that of a sleepwalker, and activated similar neural complexes woven for generations into the cortexes of their people. Walking as if in a dream, and playing their musical instruments slowly, the unconscious and semiunconscious Nymphs rose and walked in procession up the curving stairway behind the statue of Michael the Archangel.

Only Omester the Satyr was from so early a period in history that he had no such control complex in his hindbrain, and so Sir Guiden had to fling him over his shoulders fireman-style, and lead the way upstairs to the balcony.

They all emerged from the black cloud. The gas was heavier than air, so it sank rather than rose.

Oenoe, Aea, and Thysa soon formulated a philter from their mantillas to counteract the effect. Sir Guiden charged Oenoe strictly to stay here out of the line of fire, and she bowed her head in obedience to him. “We are not a warlike people, my lord husband,” she said, smiling.

And so she and her maidens commanded the unconscious ones around them play music on their pipes and harps, with sleeping lips and fingers, and she waited for them to wake.

The mantillas the Nymph ladies wore spread and flapped in time with the music, and they were spreading a cloud of perfume to lull and bedevil any dog things venturing toward that quarter of the chamber.

Thysa wandered away down the balcony, until she was directly over the alcove holding the Witchfolk. Smiling and looking down from above, she applauded their brave deeds, and threw flowers at the feet of any fighter she thought needed a moment of berserk rage to aid him in his struggle: the flowers released spores to trigger battle-frenzy.

7. Witches

There was a safety feature built into the storage vats for the dangerous medical nanomaterial fluids stored in the throne room. It was a technology from some era neither the Blues nor the Witches knew: a curtain of what could be called smart-gas, a vapor whose electrical and tangible properties could be altered upon signal, was stretched across the alcove mouth. The Witches stepped through it, baffled by the sensation as if pushing through an invisible and almost impalpable beaded curtain—but there were more desperate things to attend to, and they were willing to believe it was supernatural, perhaps benevolent, and therefore the crones promised sacrifices to the spirits of this place, the Genius Loci, asking for protection, and used secret names to threaten, bind, and command.

And then the dogs were upon them.

Twenty-four dogs were in a line before an alcove in which thirty Witches were crammed, hiding, if at all, behind suits of armor from the First Dark Ages. This was not the carbon nanotube–reinforced titanium-steel ceramic of Maltese Powered Armor. These were pieces of handmade iron, or steel forged before Bessemer invented his process.

The line of dog things was simply a firing squad. When the fighting erupted around them, and the ceiling guns destroyed those in this dog squad who had dared open fire on Bashan, the order to hold fire rang through the chamber. The Witches cheered, and mocked the dogs in a language they did not speak, and an overly excited Doberman Pinscher ordered the charge.

Bayonets ready, the dogs rushed in at top speed. The prayers to the Genius Loci were seemingly answered, because the purpose of the curtain of smart vapor was to prevent fast-moving objects from hitting the storage tanks. The air around the dogs thickened, and slowed their movements, as countless threads of invisibly fine long-chain macromolecules, diamond threads finer than spider silk and of the same index of refractivity as the air, attracted a suddenly dense substance around them by means of van der Waals forces.

The dogs could press through, of course. The curtain was not armor, after all, merely padding to prevent bumps. But the second line trampled the first when the first slowed for no visible reason.

The dog leading the charge, a beautiful white-furred American Eskimo, smote with its bayonet, but confused by the unseen curtain, it missed the screaming Witch-man and struck the wall of the container unit behind him. A stream of viscous material, which scalded it as with acid, sprayed down its musket barrel and onto its paws, and the smell, to the dog’s sensitive nose, was the smell of death. The Witch clubbed the dog to the floor with his spearshaft, and drove the point into the dog’s belly; the dog screamed in agony and terror, trying to scramble away, its entrails unspooling like grisly red spaghetti on the floor around it, and its paws still smoldering, being eaten by the strange fluid.

The Demonstrators, seeing the magic of the Hags manifested before their eyes, suddenly realized three things. First, the Witches outnumbered the dog things set against them. The other packs were elsewhere, fighting Giants or Chimerae or Hormagaunts—all of whom were creatures from one version of the Witch afterlife or another, lending for the Witches an air of unearthliness to the scene, and this perhaps aided their courage.

Second, no dog dared now to fire its weapon. The curse of the Judge of Ages, a demigod, was clearly in full force here in the buried world of his golden Tomb.

Third, the poleaxes, pikes, and halberds pulled conveniently from the walls had reach on the musket bayonets, and were lighter, and were not butt-heavy, and were in every way better designed as an implement for stabbing a foe beyond arm’s length than was either cutlass or bayonet.

So the twelve Demonstrators roared like men gone mad, and the other Witch-men, whether farmer or huntsman or factory hand, roared with them. Something in the instinctive fear of beast for man seized the line of dog things, or else they realized at the same moment their disadvantage of numbers and weapons.

The dogs broke and fled on all fours before another blow was struck. The Witches, of all races of man, were both the most in love with violence for its own sake, and the least disciplined of fighters. There was no captain to call the Witch-men back into line, and the crones did not know enough military science to give the order. The sight of a fleeing foe in combat makes a man drunk with battle-lust, and only soldiers trained to steadiness of nerve can resist the temptation.

The Demonstrators did not resist the temptation. Then ran each Witch-man whichever way his feet took him, cutting down dogs from behind, falling clumsily on gold floorplates slick with blood and entrails, and running headlong into orderly reinforcements—for the dogs did have captains—or into clouds of choking or soporific gas the automata were spraying. Whereupon the Demonstrators threw down their weapons and ran, but no farther than the nearest wall, this being no battlefield, but a locked room.

The melee with the Witches was both the clumsiest, and most brutal, and, because they were not practiced with their weapons, the least bloody part of the battle.

8. Knight

Humans were not affected by the spore released by Prissy, even though they were affected by the black gas released by the automata. Sir Guiden, now coming down the stairs behind the statue of Michael, greatly daring, hyperventilated, held his breath, and ran forward into the black cloud obscuring the throne.

He had to cross all the way from where Zouave fell, up the dais, past the throne, and down the dais to where the powered armor stood beneath the shadow of Hades. It was not a short sprint.

He opened his burning eyes once or twice, which was a mistake: the black gas contained a lachrymal agent, and tears both filled his eyes, and, under the influence of the chemical, thickened to an opaque glue. Blind, he found the powered armor, and in that hour he blessed and blessed again his drill master who had so often made him field strip and assemble his weapons while blindfolded. He opened the back of the armor, but thrust his head in first to the helmet, clicking the oxygen-helium feed wide open with his chin, so that a blast of fresh, clean air drove the fumes from him. He cried aloud for joy and battle-lust, and his voice was absurd, high and squeaky with helium.

In a moment, he was inside, blind as Samson, and equally as strong. His coif connected with mated jacks lining the helm interior; his implants could give him a fuzzy radar picture of the surroundings. A warning voice in his ear told him that discharges of chemical or energy weapons, sidearms, or rockets were unauthorized inside the chamber during Event Condition Red, and so with a grim smile Sir Guy drew the oversized claymore that hung from his war belt, flourished it in both hands, elbows high, turned on his external amplifiers, and cried out: “DEUS LO VOLT!”

And he waded out into the fray.

Musketballs fired by one or two suicidally brave dog things bounced off his chestplate and helm without even jarring him backward, but the energy pistols of the Blue Men began to crack and drill into his armor. The pistols were aimed so well that the tiny hole begun by one pistol could be found by the next, which continued boring through. He used his sword to cut free a plate of the floor, and held up the reflective, gold surface as a shield to ward off the pistol fire—which now merely concentrated on the leg and knee motors.

Alarms rang in his ears. Sir Guiden wished he could see his helmet readouts.

Automata formed a line against him. He struck right and left with his sword.

9. Knight and Warlock

The knight in powered armor and the Warlock in the coffin were at the fountain.

The knight called out through his speakers in German: “Hexen! Ready are you?”

The Warlock called out through his speakers in Virginian: “Christlich! Shall we?”

Neither understood the other. Both understood perfectly.

They charged into the thickest part of the line of automata, dog things, and little men firing energy weapons. Soorm, the fur of his head matted and dripping with blood, put his sea lion nose over the edge of the fountain, and twitched both his mismatched eyes at the sight, looking on in awe.

10. Chimerae

When first the Giant snatched up Menelaus and began charging across the chamber, Lady Ivinia and the two Beta girls, Vulpina and Suspinia, heard Daae give the order, and they let fly at Ull.

The javelin and the handmade arrows flew straight and true toward Ull. But the many, many gems on his coat flickered with energy. This was evidently more gems than he was used to manipulating, for the wooden arrows were instantly reduced to ash; the metal spearhead was seized by an invisible magnetic force, twisted, and flung to the ground like a red-hot pretzel. Annoyed, he whistled toward the Great Dane in charge of the musketeers facing the Chimerae, and called, “Rirk Refka Kak-Et! Abate this nuisance!”

The Great Dane barked back, “Me! I will do it! Them! They shall die!” But the dog thing was unwilling to fire a fusillade toward a damaged atomic pile, so it raised its snickersnee and gave the signal to charge. It led the charge itself, clutching its sword in its teeth and running on all fours.

The Chimerae, astoundingly enough, did not man their defenses, but themselves countercharged the charging dogs, moving faster on their two feet than any dog could run on four. The Chimerae wheeled right, struck the flank of the dogs, and broke through their line.

The Chimerae made for the curving staircase behind the statue of Father Time. These stairs led to the balcony opposite the one where Menelaus fought. Halfway up the stairs, where the foe could come at them only in twos and threes, the Chimerae made their stand. The Kine were at the top; the maidens with their bows were midway; and Gamma Phyle, with his sling firing over the heads of the Alphas, at the foot of the staircase.

The Great Dane was puzzled as to why the Chimerae had left one fixed position only to occupy another, but only then noticed that by dressing his lines against the alcove, he had placed his squad out of position to assault the stairs: its left flank was near the stairway, and was already pelting forward, not waiting for the tardy right flank, which was still milling near the alcove, some dogs casting for scent, having not seen which way the Chimerae went, so dark and evil-smelling was the gunpowder-filled chamber and so rapid was Chimerical flight.

The Kine brandished spears and bills they had found fallen from the trophies on the walls, but they never actually engaged any foe, except by cheers and hoots.

The Chimerae women fought like she-demons or pagan goddesses of the hunt.

The girls impaled dog things with arrows, missing never a shot. Each had shrugged one shoulder free of her uniform, so they were half-naked, breasts bound up with medical tape to protect them from the snap of the bowstring. Back they drew the creaking bows, feathers to the ear; aimed; and let fly.

It was nearly perfect conditions for shooting. Indoors, with no wind, good lighting, at close range, and no need to arc any shot; nor did the dog things or Blue Men have any cover or concealment, not even a shield to hold overhead.

Their pretty eyes narrowed and glittered with concentration. They spoke only in grunts of one word or two:

“Five confirmed.”

“Four confirmed.”

“Seven. Arm. Could die.”

“Five. Arm doesn’t count.”

“Seven. Groin.”

“Six. Ouch! But doesn’t count.”

“Seven. Through both temples.”

“Counts. Seven confirmed. We’re tied.”

“Nine. Blue.”

“Only Eight!”

“Blues count double.”

And on and on the bowstrings sang.

After a time, Suspinia ordered Franz and Ardzl to climb over the railings of the stairs and pass among the dead to recover their arrows, and whining, the Kine obeyed.

The Lady Ivinia, wielding a kitchen knife in either hand, very neatly butchered one dog after another, parrying a bayonet or cutlass with one knife, disemboweling her attacker with the other. She was careful to leave the dying sufficiently alive to die slowly, so that a pair of comrades would come to their aid and drag the wounded from the fray, occupying three soldiers for each casualty.

The Great Dane, seeing this and realizing how dangerous Lady Ivinia was, ran toward the stairs on three legs, drew its black powder pistol with its fourth, and shot her point-blank. The bullet lodged between the breasts that had suckled so many warriors of the Chimera race, and she fell backward, a look of bliss on her features. The Great Dane had time to see that neither its nor any musketballs were igniting, and had time to start wondering why, when shots from the ceiling guns blew its head and upper body into chunks and scattered them.

When Ivinia fell, a peculiar wailing cry went up from Alpha Daae, and a look of madness was in his face, and all the other Chimerae echoed it; and throughout the chamber both the later-period Witches, and the early-period Nymphs, and any who had ever faced the Chimera race for a moment quailed at that dread keening, their limbs shaken with terror; and the dogs quailed also. It was the wail of the Chimerae.

The second-in-command after the Great Dane, a Golden Retriever, barked out the order. “You! Blades out! Bayonets only! Hold fire!” And this order was repeated in other parts of the chamber, in the other fights breaking out at this same time, for others had been slain by overhead shots. The fire control panel had been destroyed, and Menelaus could give no new order to the Mälzel brain controlling the local defense, but the orders he had typed in still stood, and that included retaliation against gunfire.

Gamma Phyle, bellowing and screaming, stood above Ivinia’s fallen body and slung pellets from his sling into the skulls of any dog things or Blue Men who seemed to be giving orders. His pellets neither exploded nor emitted microwave radiation, but even a man of ordinary strength can kill with a sling and a stone, and Phyle was bred and bioengineered to strength twice that of the strongest unmodified athlete, and his eye was more keen and his aim more sure.

Preceptor Ydmoy, who despite being of greater intelligence than the Followers did not have as swift of reflexes or a habit of obeying orders, just then aimed his jeweled pistol at Gamma Phyle and fired.

With astonishing reflexes, Gamma Phyle twisted just as a microwave ray from Ydmoy’s pistol struck him, intercepting the beam-path with his left hand, so that his left arm up to the elbow was charred, but his chest was not struck and no major organs were damaged.

Meanwhile, Ydmoy was felled by wall-guns. His coat gems deflected the shots seeking him, but the weapons in the lintels of the great doors, more sophisticated, sprayed him with a gush of liquid fire, a substance his magnetics could not deflect. He could utter only one scream, because after that his lungs were charred and motionless. The little man ran hither and thither for a moment, eyes and tongue consumed from his skull, fatty cells in his skin and muscles being eaten by fire, and then collapsed to the floor, flopping like a beached fish, in a spreading stench and puddle of his own blood and entrails, and many gems of his torn coat lay in the red mire glowing like live coals.

Phyle continued to fight one-handed, and the smart fibers in his uniform sleeve made themselves into a tourniquet. Because he had no sensation in that arm, he thrust the smoking arm fragment into the jaws of a dog thing that leaped on him; it closed its jaws on the dead arm by reflex, and Phyle, with reflexes better trained, crushed its windpipe with a stiff-fingered blow from his other hand. He plucked the saber from its belt as the dog-corpse fell away and he slew any dog near him, cutting his way toward the commanding Blue Men. More and more fell before him: there was something horrible in the sight, like seeing awkward but enthusiastic children cut down by a hardened and trained veteran.

Phyle was not the most excellent of his race. He was merely a Gamma.

Daae strode forth, crying out the name of Ivinia, challenging all comers. He killed dog things, one after the next after the next, with perfectly executed and practiced strokes of his shillelagh.

After killing an even score of them, Daae turned and saw a grenadier among the dogs, with a haversack full of petards and grenades. Now he nimbly plucked the musket from dying paws, turned, and drove the bayonet into and through the grenade pouch of the grenadier, and into its kidneys. Now he leaned into the musket and screamed and ran, pushing the stumbling and bleeding grenadier dog thing back into the arms of its own comrades and pack leaders. These were the highest ranked of the dogs, their alphas and captains. Then Daae shouted, “Save my people, Judge of Ages! I never disbelieved of you!”

He pulled the trigger, so that the grenades, petards, fuses, and powder in the bulging ammo haversack ignited in every direction, killing more than a dozen at once, including the pack leaders, and wounding many others. A fusillade from the ceiling guns blew apart his shoulder, chest, and head, and Daae fell without a word. But even as the bullets struck, even as he fell, even as he died, he contrived to fling his body forward onto the dogs, so that the ricochets, divots, and shrapnel from the overhead guns would pass through his body and pierce his foes. With his last thought and his last breath and his last moment of life, he made his own corpse into a weapon against the enemy.

The dogs in this part of the chamber all yowled in panic and wrath, and they broke ranks, each attacking merely whatever was before its nose, without discipline or thought. That was the turning point of the fight.

Yet, for all this, neither was Daae the most excellent of his race, being past his prime and from what, by Chimera standards, counted as a peaceful era.

It was Yuen, the young pantherish Chimera, who shined with battle fury beyond description in that hour. He was as an acrobat, his every move and block and thrust a work of art. He threw himself bodily into the air, sailing over the head of the nearest dog thing as it stooped to thrust, landing at its back to grapple its neck, and then Yuen turned, pulling the beast into the line of the stroke of the dog thing behind it, who had also lunged with its bayonet. The one dog thing impaled its packmate while Yuen, in the same split second of time, caved in the canine skull with a blow from Arroglint, the metal whip being stiffened at that moment into a quarterstaff.

The next moment, Arroglint was as a spear of fire: with it, Yuen began killing dogs and Blue Men, one after another, with dainty mechanical precision. He would wait for his opponent to lunge with bayonet, parry the barrel of the musket with his weapon, and down the foe with a quick thrust to the neck, or head; for the smartmetal tip had formed a blade, and the smartmetal neck would telescope outward like a bright finger, swift as the stinger of a wasp, and the blade-metal emitted infrared hot enough to cook whatever it touched.

Dogs with ax and fang, dagger and claw, and snickersnee came pelting in, howling in rage, lunging for Yuen. The dogs cried out, “Him! He is but one man! Us! We are many! Kill, kill and slay!” But Arroglint was suddenly the tentacle of an octopus of steel, writhing and binding any limbs that ventured too close. An electric charge in the whip-metal stiffened the muscles of the trapped dogs, who trembled in agony without motion for an artistic moment while Yuen paused as if to admire the effect of the sinuous cursive curls; then the whip loops snapped closed, and amputated limbs jumped in the air like festive hats tossed at a celebration, if the hats trailed long red wet scarves.

Yuen danced over the still-living bodies of the armless and legless foes, crushing necks and groins beneath his feet, hearing their screams and cries and whimpers, and he closed with the next line of dogs, spinning his weapon like a circle of fire.

When he parried blades of steel, electricity jumped from his staff, shocking them motionless; and in that motionless moment, Arroglint became a flail or truncheon or lasso or bill or mattock or poleax or lance, and crushed or bludgeoned or strangled or stabbed or hewed or cleaved or pierced.

There were some he neither electrocuted nor lit their fur afire, and these he more mercifully dispatched with a blow from his elbow or knee or the side of whichever hand was not whirling his weapon at that moment. And one, a dog in the act of fleeing, he killed with an elegant aerial kick which he executed by using Arroglint as a pole-vaulter’s pole: at that point, the inequality of prowess had become clear, so he was merely showing off.

The automata gave him less trouble than the dog things, since he could drive his telescoping lance neatly through the open gridwork of their bodies, and impale their brainboxes and blow out all their circuits with electric jolts.

Yndelf had the misfortune of riding one of these mechanisms, and Yuen broke Yndelf’s neck with one hand, and held the little man before him like a shield when Naar sent two machine gun–bearing automata stalking toward him. Naar was evidently willing to let the ceiling guns blast one automaton or two in return for stopping the deadly young Chimera from the most warlike period of Chimera history.

The safety circuits in the automata would not allow it to shoot at the dead Yndelf, whose coat gems were still active. So Yuen and the gun-bearing automata began an odd dancing race of cycles and epicycles, as the automata attempted to take Yuen in the flank or rear to find a shot not blocked by the dead man’s coat, and Yuen, laughing in anger, turned and turned again, making his way across the floor back to the damaged atomic pile.

As it turned out, some other safety circuit, or perhaps interference to their electronics caused by the high radiation count, prevented the automata from firing at the broken sphere of gold, and Yuen struck again and again with the telescoping length of his electrified weapon, poking out cameras and controls, electronic eyes and mechanical brains, until the automata stood still and blind and useless, emitting the plaintive horn-hoots that called in vain for maintenance crews.

Yuen strode forth, kicked an automaton in the arm so that its machine guns pointed back toward the largest cluster of Blue Men, inserted his whip-head into the control socket, danced back into the alcove, and triggered the automaton. A hail of bullets killed a number of Blue Men before the ceiling weapons blasted the automaton into parts, but ignored Yuen. Then Yuen sauntered out, tilted the next armed automaton to point its cannons at the puzzled and woebegone Blues, plugged in his whip, skipped backward, and fired again.

Meanwhile, from halfway across the chamber, Invigilator Saaev, riding an automaton that was throwing canisters of black gas among the Witches, looked upward warily, but the ceiling guns had not been commanded to react to his form of attack. Various heavy guns in the upper walls twitched, but none of them fired at the automata distributing nonlethal gas.

Saaev turned and had his automaton pelt Yuen with one gas canister after another. The western alcove filled with opaque black clouds.